I'm Marilyn Monroe

Getting out

I don't own Smash, or the characters in it. I don't own anything but my writing.

“She's singing your song. She's singing it in front of a thousand people that came to see her, she's singing our song”.

She could hear the music in her head, every chord torturing her in ways she never imagined a song would be able to, and she was right all along, it wasn't the song that was making her squirm in pain, it was the fact that this particular song was being sang by another voice, another person.

She could live with losing her part, she could live with losing her shot at fame, but she couldn't live with losing that song.

“It's your song” Ivy whispered to the picture of Marilyn on her mirror and seeing the wide smile on Marilyn's red perfect lips just made her feel like ripping those pictures out, but she didn't. Instead she stared at them again like she had done so many times before.

“You were perfect and still you felt like you were nothing, just look at me...” her eyes focused on her own reflect, her hair was pure gold and her makeup was perfectly done. “am I perfect already?”.

Ivy got up from her desk and looked down at herself “maybe I'm just not talented enough, pretty enough” she took a deep breath taking another look at herself “maybe I'm not thin enough, Karen is thin enough isn't she?” a small hurt laugh left her mouth “after all she's the chosen one”.

“How did you do it?” she was talking to the pictures again, feeling ridiculous once more but not caring at all “they never forgot you, but they never remembered me. I'm always the second one to call, the second one to applaud, the second one...”, she had been the second one since the moment she was born, cursed under the endless shadow of her own mother, being told everyday how she was not enough to the dreams she dreamed, how imperfect she was.

Don't get Ivy wrong, she never really blamed her mother for anything, she didn't believe her mother to be a bad mother and if she was Ivy wouldn't be able to tell the difference, after all she never had another mother.

Even while reading about Marilyn and her life, Ivy never believed Gladys to be a bad mom just as she never believed Norma Jean to be a bad daughter, they were just different, troubled, mistaken, as herself. Second handed people who never knew any other reality.

Since she was a little girl, Ivy was used to see her mom on stage, shinning so brightly that she could feel her mom's light touching her skin, and for many nights Ivy would sit alone in her bed trying to belt a few notes just like her mom, just like that magnificent woman she learned to admire without effort. For years the will of becoming a singer/actress grew inside her until she finally found the courage to voice it to her mother, and once more she was told how not good enough she was, how she should choose to do something else.

For a while she believed, for a while she gave up. Until the day she saw her first Marilyn's movie, she was 12 years old, a little girl seating alone in front of a screen, bright eyes just like Norma Jean had been so many years before. That was the same day Ivy decided she would be just like Monroe, the same day she started to read every book she could find about that amazing woman that had made her believe again.